Foxes jumping on trampolines!

Yo + a recipe

…Mostly I’ve been working and looking after Cecil and agonizing. That counts as life, right?

Anyway, I’m not going to give you a report on What I Did on my Blogging Vacation, but I WILL give you possibly my greatest contribution to humanity: I have figured out how to make something edible out of the byproduct of making soymilk.

It’s called okara, and if you make soymilk you will know that you wind up with a tonne of the stuff. It has lots of protein and vitamins and stuff in it, so I’ve been trying different recipes of things to do with it. I made some OK okara burgers, but it called for red wine and yeast extract (!) which rather knocked down the cost-effectiveness. So I’ve been experimenting and this is my result.

GIANT DISCLAIMER – you must use cooked okara in this recipe. If you’re using a soymilk maker, which you really should invest in if you make soymilk more often than twice a month, the okara will be cooked by the machine. If you’re making it by hand and you boil the soymilk after straining it, you need to cook your okara. I think you can steam it. If you toast it I don’t think this recipe will work, which sucks, because you will have even more massive quantities of okara on hand than I do. Sorry!

Okara nuggets

Take

3/4 C cooked fine okara (this is the amount that comes out of my soymilk maker; scale up as necessary). Press or wring as much liquid as you can out of it. This is a really important step – if you don’t get the liquid out the nuggets will be mushy.

Mix in

1/2 tsp salt – yes, this is a lot of salt. Okara has an incredible power of blandness. It needs it.
1-2 tsp of whatever spices you like – I put in some onion powder, cracked pepper, and minced garlic

Mix well. Add

1/4 c vital wheat gluten (you could probably use ground oats or rice flour just to thicken if you don’t do gluten, you just won’t get a meaty texture)

Knead until strings of gluten form. Form into nugget shapes. You should get 6-8 small nuggets. Coat in

– panko or crushed crackers

Spray with olive oil or cooking spray. Bake at 375 for 15 minutes, flip, spray again, and bake for 15 minutes more. Turn off the oven and leave them there. They’ll continue to firm up as they cool.

Serve warm or cool with ketchup, vegetarian tonkatsu sauce, or barbecue sauce.
I wouldn’t call these AMAZING, but they are pretty good and Cecil loves them, and you are getting not only 8 cups of milk but a decent meat substitute out of 50 cents of soybeans, so how can you go wrong?

HELPFUL HINTS: If you can’t use your okara within two days of making milk, freeze it and use it later. It goes bad pretty quickly. Also it doesn’t seem to matter if you take the hulls off the soybeans or not. I never bother. And seriously, use cooked okara. Uncooked soybeans are toxic to humans.

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